Texas Rep. Pat Fallon dumped Microsoft stock before Pentagon nixed $10B JEDI contract
By Theo Wayt
July 14, 2021 | 5:05pm
A congressman who supervises the Defense Department’s tech spending dumped up to $250,000 worth of Microsoft stock two weeks before the Pentagon revealed it was canceling a $10 billion contract with the software giant, according to public documents.
US Rep. Pat Fallon, a Texas Republican who sits on a key subcommittee overseeing the Department of Defense’s technology policy, sold between $100,000 and $250,000 of Microsoft shares on June 21, government disclosures show.
Two weeks later, the Pentagon made the surprise announcement that it would cancel a $10 billion cloud computing contract — called JEDI, or Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure — that it had awarded to Microsoft in 2019 after the company fought a bidding war and legal battle against Amazon.
Fallon, who was elected last year to represent a northeastern district of the Lone Star State, is a member of the House’s Subcommittee on Cyber, Innovative Technologies, and Information Systems. According to the subcommittee’s site, Fallon and his colleagues have “jurisdiction over Department of Defense policy related to the acquisition of computer software.”
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https://nypost.com/2021/07/14/texas-rep-pat-fallon-dumped-microsoft-stock-before-pentagon-nixed-10b-contract/
